May 2025

And what if, for once, I put a little life into my post for a change? One may well be fond of the savoury, but a touch of the sweet now and again does no harm. Let us do as one does at the psychiatrist's, and get Gabriel onto the famous couch.

The dear boy is thirty — or so it is believed. He has spent the better part of his existence in a churchyard, raised by a banshee, a vampire, and a merry throng of ghosts. Who is he? Where does he come from? Why was he abandoned in that particular churchyard, and not another?

Arm yourself with patience. The answers arrive in dribs and drabs. This is deliberate, I assure you — not a failing on the author's part... myself, in this instance.

I discovered writing with the clumsy enthusiasm of the inspired novice, stars in my eyes. My first version not having met with the success I had hoped for, I studied the question of reader attention at great length. It would seem, if I have understood correctly what was explained to me and duly put into practice, that a human being is hooked by two principles of a disarming simplicity: curiosity and frustration.

At the outset, one must work extremely hard to draw the reader into our little fictional world. To that end, one piques their curiosity without supplying all the answers, and, hey presto, once the fish decides to swim, it finds itself lost in my pretty nets. And so the ride begins. The more one plays the reckless driver, the better. Do not over-explain; trust the reader's intelligence to join the dots.

Believe it or not, this was the hardest part for me. Twenty-seven years spent explaining the same principles in various ways in the classroom rather conditioned me to over-explain everything I put in place. Bad. The reader ought to be wondering: "But why? But how?" Adrenaline must take the wheel.

And once the reader we have so assiduously courted is finally with us, we cut away brutally. The cliffhanger is our best friend. English soaps and Brazilian telenovelas have built entire franchises on this very principle. Hard to fault them for it. If it works for them...

It sounds simple. It is not. The fish does not hook itself at the end of the line on its own: one must tease it along for quite some time. Still, I do believe, in all naivety and candour, that I have found part of the formula. I still have my work cut out for me, but Rome was not built in a day... and neither was CastleHill.